• Bring on the new brands: One of the great mysteries in the wine business is how many wines actually exist. It’s also a mystery why it’s a mystery, since wine is regulated and this should not be difficult to determine. But it is, and the best guess has been about 15,000, which includes different varietals but not different vintages. Turns out that may be just a fraction of the total, according to Ship Compliant, a company that helps wineries through the maze of regulation. It found that the federal government approved 93,000 labels in 2013. However, since that could include changes to old labels or old wine given a new name, as well as wines that were proposed but never made it to market, there probably aren’t 93,000 wines available for sale. Which, given the size of the Great Wall of Wine, is no doubt a good thing.

• Bring on the lawyers: The Wine Curmudgeon notes this item not because he expects anyone to understand it unless they are a liquor law attorney with a large staff, but to remind the world, again, of the pointlessness of the three-tier system unless you are a distributor or attorney. It details a court case in which a distributor is suing a producer even though the producer followed the letter of the law. Or something like that. Regardless of the outcome, it will make no difference to anyone who buys wine. Incidentally, this is a jury trial. I can only shake my head in sympathy for those poor jurors, and hope they have lots of wine at home for afterwards. Update: Hours — literally — after I posted this, the suit was settled. No doubt they were terrified the jury would laugh at them, go home, and open a beer.

• They don’t include wine sales at Target, Walmart, and Costco. Throw those in, and that 20 percent total should increase by more than a few points.

• Wine was bigger than a host of established items, including cereal, coffee, bottled water, cookies, and soup. Some of that was because wine is more expensive; we bought three times more cans of soup than bottles of wine. Even so, it’s an impressive total, given the restrictions on wine sales. In Texas, for example, we can buy soup as long as the store is open, but we can’t buy wine on Sunday until noon.

• Wine’s growth was bigger than soft drinks, which lost 3.9 percent, as well as cereal (down 4.3 percent), ice cream (down 0.3 percent), frozen pizza (unchanged), and toilet paper (-0.2 percent). I can’t even pretend to make sense of that. Since when did we need wine more than toilet paper?

These numbers, more than anything else, explain why there is so much opposition to supermarket wine sales in the 19 states where it’s still prohibited. We’re not buying jug wine at the grocery store. That $9 average price means we’re buying many of the same wines we’d buy at wine shops and liquor stores, and small retailers don’t want the competition.

The irony is that, as has been noted on the blog, small retailers may prosper competing with grocers, since they offer something supermarkets can’t — someone to answer questions. The Great Wall of Wine has nothing to do with service.

The biggest surprise in the Wine Genome study from Constellation Brands, one of the biggest wine companies in the world? That one-fifth of us buy wine on price.

“We knew they were out there, but the widening span of the study showed how deeply the recession cut,” said Dale Stratton, the Constellation official who oversaw this version, the third, of the company’s Project Genome, designed to identify the most common types of of wine drinkers based on purchase behavior, motivation, and preferences. “The recession had a big impact and significantly changed consumer spending habits.”

Stratton laughed when I asked him about this. No, he said, it’s not that Constellation (whose brands include Rex Goliath, Mark West, and Robert Mondavi) didn’t expect price to be important. Rather, it’s that price-driven wine drinkers were the biggest category of the six, doubling the number of Enthusiasts — those who “love everything about the wine experience,” including researching purchases, reading reviews, and sharing wine with others. In other words, the Winestream Media’s audience. The other thing to note here? The Enthusiasts account for 15 percent of profit, compared to 14 percent for the Price-Driven group. Harrumph.

• The third-biggest group, at 19 percent, are Overwhelmed, which means pretty much what it says: “I don’t enjoy shopping for wine, and find it complex and overwhelming. This, says Stratton, reinforces the need for wine education, not only for consumers but for those who sell wine — distributors, retailers, and restaurateurs. Hearing this was surprising enough, but I almost dropped the phone when Stratton said that winespeak is one of the reasons the overwhelmed are overwhelmed. Maybe, he said, retailers and wine writers should find simpler terms to use.

• Women, who have traditionally skewed higher for wine purchases at the lower end, are becoming more important at the higher end. The Enthusiasts, who were about 65 percent male in 2004, were close to 50-50 this time. “This means more women see wine as a hobby,” says Stratton, and that means more women attend tastings and shop at wine-specific retailers.

• Wine snobs, called Image Seekers, are still with us, and in a big way. They account for 18 percent of wine drinkers, but contribute 26 percent of profits, more than any other group. Given the wine they drink, that’s probably not surprising.

• Welcome the Millennials to wine, in the form of the Engaged Newcomer at 12 percent. This group is young, wants to learn more, and recognizes that wine is intimidating. They also spend more on a bottle than the other groups, about $13.

One other point worth noting: This kind of study is common for consumer packaged goods like laundry detergent and ketchup. That Constellation can do for wine what Proctor & Gamble does for its products speaks volumes about how much the wine business has changed, and that it is becoming more mainstream.

“Wine is increasing household penetration at a good clip, and the audience has broadened,” said Stratton. “And it’s going to continue to change, as the American population changes.”